Coronavirus may have a weak point – and hand washing, face masks ‘may help block transmission chain’, study says
- Chinese non-peer reviewed paper suggests virus has a narrow bottleneck, meaning the number of particles passed on from a host to others
- Scientists did genetic sequencing on viral strains from 13 patients in Guangdong province to reconstruct how it spread
That would be considered a narrow transmission bottleneck – meaning the number of virus particles that can be transmitted from someone who is infected to other people.
“Only a few virions [entire virus particles] successfully enter host cells and eventually cause infection,” the researchers, led by Xu Yonghao, from the National Clinical Research Centre for Respiratory Disease in Guangzhou, wrote in a non-peer reviewed paper posted on bioRxiv.org on Friday.
This would suggest that hand hygiene and wearing face masks were effective ways to stop transmission of the virus, said the paper, co-authored by top Chinese respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan.
Sars-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19, uses ribonucleic acid, or RNA, produced by the body to store its genetic information. RNA can produce proteins at a rapid rate, but its single-stranded structure makes it less stable than double-stranded DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid.
That means the virus can mutate at a relatively fast pace – so as the coronavirus spreads in a host from organ to organ, the viral genes are constantly changing.